Daily Care and weekly tank maintenance (1 Viewer)

[codesman]

I was just asked by my employer to work for a year out of state. I declined citing the expense of a daily sitter and a weekly maintenance company to take care of my livestock/tank would be cost prohibitive for me. The company is on the smaller side and I have a feeling they might ask again, prepared to pay for such services for me. Does anyone know a good Twin cities based daily tank sitter, a good maintenance company, and about what the monthly rates are? I REALLY don't want to take down the tank. I live in Vadnais Heights.

 

[ichthyogeek]

I asked a former UMN student to fish sit for me for a few weeks over the holidays. I paid her roughly $30/day for an hour's work every day on average. If I could pay her more, I would tbh. DM me your contact info and I can pass it on to her so she can reach out?

I asked my sitter to do the following on a daily/weekly basis:
Weekly:
* Fill autofeeders with fish food
* do water changes using premixed water
Daily:
* Feed fish frozen food
* Feed fish baby brine shrimp
* do fish counts (check if anything's dead)
* water plants/top off tanks as needed.

You can also like, call Rivershore, New Wave, etc. Most of the stores have maintenance accounts.

 

[Bschowa]

Will there be other people in the house that can visually check the tank who could be trusted to see if anything looks wrong/alarms are going off?

I occasionally have had to work out of town for a couple weeks at a time in the past where I did not have that so the tank was by itself. Auto feeder/top off was a life saver and instead of paying someone to look at the tank daily I setup nest cameras with all sorts of angles where I could check on anything I wanted at any time, orange tint/filters clean up the image, cameras on the tank, sump,skimmer and then having them alert to noises and send a message if they heard anything I was able to know if there was alerts on my apex going off odd sounds anything really.

You could then have new wave or a trusted friend on call for an emergency.

It sounds like you will be gone and not coming back for a while and in that case I would talk to Jen at new wave and maybe setup a service where they do water changes and fill feeders so that your automation does the heavy lifting and they are just there for water changes/ scraping glass

 

[codesman]

Unfortunately no trusted people close. It would be a case of me trying to automate everything I can.
I already have called Jen at new wave for a quote along with premier aquarium.

Ichthyo thanks for the recommendation towards that student. If you don't mind I'll keep that in the back pocket for now. I'm just going off the feeling they will circle around. I wouldn't want to get your contacts hopes up only to back out of it falls through.

BSCH thanks for the recommendation for cameras and filters. It's a good idea and one I will implement when the time comes.

All in all, looks like I have a lot of automation I have to set up soon.